In a keynote address to a conference gathering in Cork some years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney retold the story of a local schoolmaster who, in an effort to identify which of two pupils was copying from the other, sat them down beside each other and set them an essay on "The Swallow". Shortly after they began to write he separated them and, on reading their compositions a few minutes later, instantly recognised the plagiarist by the disjunctive idiom of his opening sentences: "The swallow is a migratory bird. He have a roundy head."
Heaney describes this clash between the formal correctness of textbook English and the faulty grammar of "the resurrected afterlife of the Irish" as "a two-sentence history of Anglo-Irish literature" which encapsulates Ireland's dual linguistic and literary heritage. This complex inheritance has been the subject of many scholarly commentaries, most of which, tellingly, separate Irish writing into its Gaelic and "Anglo-Irish" components, thereby replicating the primary duality inscribed by that pair of discordant sentences. In Irish Classics, the follow-up to his acclaimed 1995 blockbuster Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd brilliantly reverses this trend by bringing Ireland's two literary cultures into the same critical frame to examine the formal, conceptual and ideological continuities and contrasts between them. Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is one of the very few contemporary critics with the skill, intelligence and linguistic competence to undertake such an ambitious critical enterprise. That he has chosen to do so now, at the height of his powers, will delight readers, critics and practitioners of Irish literature everywhere.
Whereas Inventing Ireland discussed Irish writing in the English language from Wilde to Friel, Irish Classics focuses on representative "classic" texts in both languages from the early 1600s to the 1950s. The postcolonial theories which Kiberd used so effectively in Inventing Ireland are again applied here, where they are supplemented by the anthropological insights of theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss. The result is a 700-page critical tour de force, a superb exemplar of the author's stated belief in compassionate, engaged criticism which is both exacting and empathetic.
As the author defines it, a classic is a work which retains its capacity "to remain forever young and fresh, offering challenges to every succeeding generation which must learn anew how to be its contemporary". Irish classics fall into three types: works of great beauty, rigour and energy, such as Joyce's Ulysses; works which embody myths of supernatural force, such as the Cuchulain story; and texts that exert "a palpable influence upon the course of human action or the prosecution of public policy", such as Swift's Drapier's Letters.
Some of Kiberd's "classic" choices - Wolfe Tone's journal, for example, or Kate O'Brien's The Ante Room - do not immediately suggest themselves as such. Others, notably Somerville and Ross's The Silver Fox, seem almost wilfully obscure. But one of the great pleasures of reading this book comes from observing the skilful way in which the author recruits such neglected texts for his central thesis. He does so by sensitively exposing their inner workings, while at the same time situating them in the wider social and political contexts out of which they came. Through such lucid readings Kiberd admirably fulfils the terms of his own description of the literary critic as "a person who may find yet newer meanings and values in a text, meanings and values which might well surprise the original author and will surely dismay and even outrage previous readers".
One of the chief strengths of this book is Kiberd's treatment of Ireland's two literary traditions as part of a cultural continuum rather than as oppositional entities. Such an approach is itself part of a critical continuum that incorporates the writings of Vivian Mercier, Daniel Corkery, Thomas MacDonagh and Charlotte Brooke, each of whom argued for the essential continuity of the two cultures. Kiberd goes further, however, by bringing outwardly disparate texts and authors into radical propinquity. Swift is aligned with Art Mac Cumhaigh, Edmund Burke with Daibhi O Bruadair, Richard Brinsley Sheridan with Brian Merriman, Joyce with Sean O Riordain. He even traces a lineal descent between the poetry of Goldsmith and the rhetoric of Yeats and Eamon de Valera. In all of this, Kiberd's expansive scholarship sparkles, as does his mischievous wit. Who else could gloss the continually expected death of Gaelic Ireland with a quip from Woody Allen, or compare Cuchulain to an English public schoolboy in drag?
ONE notable by-product of Kiberd's bicultural approach is to make us reconsider our accepted notions of what constitutes originality in Irish writing. In his paradoxical scheme of things, the shock of the new has already been anticipated by the modernity of the old. For example, those archetypal works of 20thcentury modernism, Ulysses and Malone Dies, are here shown to have precedents when located within a native frame. In the same way, Kiberd detects all kinds of intriguing pre-echoes in many of his classic subjects. Daibhi O Bruadair is cast as a Gaelic precursor of Baudelaire, Maria Edgeworth's Thady Quirk becomes a distant forerunner of Joseph Conrad's Marlow and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and, in the most audacious conceit of all, Wolfe Tone is installed as the first Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama.
Such sensitivity to the "promissory notes" within Irish writing informs the foundational thesis of Irish Classics, which is that since the collapse of the Gaelic system of bardic patronage in the 17th century, Irish culture has provided a test-case for an advanced form of modernity. The dispossessed bardic poets were the earliest inheritors of this "modernity avant la lettre", and since then, "for writers as disparate as O Bruadair and Yeats, to be Irish was to be modern anyway, whether one liked it or not", since each artist "has had to cope, in his or her way, with the coercive onset of modernity".
The main way in which Irish writers have dealt with this enforced modernity, Kiberd claims, is by becoming conservative revolutionaries, at once defenders of tradition and agents of innovation. Such "Tory anarchism" is the quality that unites writers as diverse as Burke, Tone, Hyde, Somerville and Ross, Flann O'Brien and the Blasket autobiographers, all of whom have created narratives that seek "to salvage something of value from the past, even as the forces of the new world are embraced". The formal corollary of such radical traditionalism is the ability to express new ideas in time-honoured forms and to allow ancient idealisms to permeate new forms. From Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill's 18th-century lyric masterpiece, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire, to Mairtin O Cadhain's fabulist anti-novel, Cre Na Cille, this double impulse has been coded into the formal patterns of Irish writing, marking it out as distinctively modern.
This propensity for dialectical thinking goes to the heart of one of Kiberd's central contentions, which is that "all truly vibrant cultures are Janus-faced, capable of looking backward and forward at the same time". Such double-mindedness is inherently inimical to fixed borders and mutually exclusive identities, preferring instead the inclusive freedoms of multiple, plural states. It is Kiberd's contention that Irish writers have been exploring such liminal zones for centuries, bearing in their texts "blueprints for possible worlds", anticipating, and in some ways enabling, the creation of futures not yet fashioned.
In his provocative and passionate final chapter, Kiberd identifies the 1998 Belfast Agreement as the most recent example of politics catching up with art. With audible commitment to its pluralist aesthetic, he reads the Agreement as a version of Irish modernism, a text which shows itself to be radically traditional by making nationality a matter of choice rather than destiny: "Irish or British, or both". Such a flexible conception of identity, of course, has already been imagined by dramatists such as Wilde and Shaw, both celebrants of hybridity and androgyny, and by poets like Louis MacNeice, a spokesman for plurality if ever there was one. All anticipate the central insight of the Agreement: "that an unprecedented knowledge is possible in zones where cultures collide".
Irish Classics is itself a magnificent embodiment of this profound truth. By bringing his sharp critical intelligence to bear upon the liminal spaces between Ireland's two literary cultures, Declan Kiberd has immensely enriched our knowledge and understanding of their fertile confluence. This is literary criticism of the best kind: enlightening and entertaining, authoritative and accessible, committed and inspiring.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish Studies at St Mary's College in London. He is co-editor of Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories and is currently compiling an anthology of autobiographical prose by the Irish in Britain